Balancing increasing demand for wood products while also maintaining forest biodiversity is a paramount challenge. Europe's Biodiversity and Forest Strategies for 2030 attempt to address this challenge. Together, they call for strict protection of 10% of land area, including all primary and old growth forests, increasing use of ecological forestry, and less reliance on monocultural plantations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past few decades, increasing populations of cervid species in the Baltic region have reduced the quality and vitality of cultivated Norway spruce ( (L.) Karst.) stands.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe climate change scenarios RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5, with a representative concentration pathway for stabilization of radiative forcing of 4.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFConifers are long-lived and slow-evolving, thus requiring effective defences against their fast-evolving insect natural enemies. The copy number variation (CNV) of two key acetophenone biosynthesis genes Ugt5/Ugt5b and βglu-1 may provide a plausible mechanism underlying the constitutively variable defence in white spruce (Picea glauca) against its primary defoliator, spruce budworm. This study develops a long-insert sequence capture probe set (Picea_hung_p1.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnder the intensifying cyclonic activity, the wind resistance of European forests could be increased through science-based adaptive forest management, which requires the quantification of tree stability. In this regard, the dimensions of the soil-root plate can be directly attributed to tree wind resistance; however, naturally uprooted trees might be a biased source of information for the evaluation of adaptive measures due to uncontrolled conditions and uneven sample size. Therefore, the dimensions of the soil-root plates of naturally windthrown silver birch trees ( Roth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRiparian forests are important ecosystems located along the margins of freshwaters. Riparian zones provide many ecosystem services, such as nutrient modification, erosion and temperature control, leading to improvements in water quality in adjacent water ecosystems. In many areas, riparian forest management is restricted to improve adjacent water quality.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn Northern Europe, the ongoing winter warming along with increasing precipitation shortens the periods for which soil is frozen, which aggravates the susceptibility of forest stands to wind damage under an increasing frequency of severe wind events via the reduction in soil-root anchorage. Such processes are recognized to be explicit in moist and loose soils, such as deep peat, while stands on dry mineral soils are considered more stable. In the hemiboreal forest zone in the Eastern Baltics, silver birch ( Roth.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicropropagation of forest reproductive material is becoming an increasingly important tool of climate-smart forest management, whose efficiency is depending on artificial illumination, which in turn can have species-specific effects. To improve the energy-efficiency of micropropagation, light emitting diodes (LED) are becoming more popular; however, they emit light of narrow spectral composition, synergic effects of which can alter plantlet development. Regarding the in vitro cultures of trees, such effects have been scarcely studied.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe role of future forests in global biogeochemical cycles will depend on how different tree species respond to climate. Interpreting the response of forest growth to climate change requires an understanding of the temporal and spatial patterns of seasonal climatic influences on the growth of common tree species. We constructed a new network of 310 tree-ring width chronologies from three common tree species (Quercus robur, Pinus sylvestris and Fagus sylvatica) collected for different ecological, management and climate purposes in the south Baltic Sea region at the border of three bioclimatic zones (temperate continental, oceanic, southern boreal).
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